Margarita’s fifty-sixth birthday begins with suspicion of her husband’s infidelities and ends with his WhatsApp declaration, “I love you and I’m with you.” In between, Margarita passes the day with women – in search of and in person – earning her “dazzling lucidity” by nighttime. She...
Twenty-something Clara could seem content with her life: caring friends, social invitations, cozy apartment, a career in publishing, even a book contract. But French Canadian cartoonist Mirion Malle (The League of Super Feminists) introduces her protagonist with a speech bubble – a disturbing confession revealing...
Argentinian literary powerhouse Selva Almada's stupendous second novel (after The Wind that Lays Waste) opens and ends in a deserted fairground where death claims two young men predestined to hate each other. Pájaro Tamai is "sprawled on his back," although just earlier that evening his ribs...
*STARRED REVIEW Author Yeorim Yoon invites readers into a welcoming haven in the Korean import It's OK, Slow Lizard, gorgeously illustrated by Jian Kim. In an idyllic forest live five wonderful friends: Little Bird, Elephant, Rabbit, Monkey, and Slow Lizard. Basking in gentle sunlight, Slow Lizard enjoys...
*STARRED REVIEW At a mere 160 pages, Miléna Babin's The Strange Scent of Saffron might seem spare, but its sizable cast and numerous crisscrossing narratives produce a dense, intricate, utterly satisfying read. In the town of Le Bic, Quebec, two strangers meet over an exquisite meal at the...
In the chilling, spare-but-oh-so-dense novel The Rooftop, Uruguyan writer Fernanda Trías introduces Clara – her name a sharp contrast to her uncertainty, her unknowing – as she recounts the life that she announces on the opening page "came to an end today." Once upon a time,...
Pulitzer Prize-winning polyglot Jhumpa Lahiri’s second title in Italian arrives in her own translation, narrated by Italian American Susan Vinciotti Bonito. Despite Bonito’s fluency in their shared language, her noticeably youthful timbre isn’t initially convincing as Lahiri’s unnamed, 40-something protagonist. And yet Lahiri’s unadorned, sharply...
In the “big city” of Seoul, love isn’t easy to find – even tougher to secure is love that lasts. Young and Jaehee are best friends from university, bonded in their “boundless energy of [being] poor, promiscuous twenty-year-olds.” Young is a gay man, Jaehee a straight...
Once upon a time, Wu Shih-sheng had a happy home with his wife and daughter. But then his daughter ran away and he fell heavily into debt after an accident; lost their home; took to sporadically driving a taxi; forced his wife, Kuo Hsiang-ying, into...
Kong Deok-geun is an “average administrative worker,” a position for which he surpassed 137 applicants for “a job that has no work.” His boredom, so severe that he’s named it “I-would-rather-eat-dog-treats-than-suffer-this-boredom,” sends him to the fourth floor, where he discovers Cabinet 13, then spends an...
*STARRED REVIEW The Western publishing world has taken a quarter-century to deliver one of Korea’s most lauded writers to English-reading audiences. Publishing and prize-winning since 1996, Yeo-sun Kwon is deftly translated by award-winning Korean Canadian Janet Hong. At 18, high-school senior Kim Hae-on “was perfection, bliss...
Adolescent challenges are a ubiquitous rite of passage from which no child seems immune. And yet relatively recent manga sensation Wayama – her three titles published in her native Japan have each won major lauds – manages to charmingly defuse some of the most potentially...
“If I could put it into words, I wouldn’t be drawing it,” the cartoonist insists. In mostly black-and-white panels laden with exquisite details, Zuo Ma intertwines autobiography with fantasy, their relationship revealed some 200 pages into the unpredictable narrative. A young man returns home from city...
*STARRED REVIEW Mariana Enriquez’s second collection, after 2017’s Things We Lost in the Fire, is insatiably addicting even as the dozen stories are gruesome, lurid, and utterly weird. As a Buenos Aires journalist, she witnessed true horror, the consequences of dictatorship, corruption, 30,000 disappeared; her literary...
*STARRED REVIEW Prodigious author, journalist, and translator Juan Gabriel Vásquez (Reputations, 2016), one of South America’s most important writers, is once again deftly translated by award-winning Canadian Anne McLean. Four stories provokingly manipulate time. In “Woman on the Riverbank,” a war photographer briefly encounters a politician’s assistant...
*STARRED REVIEW The Seoul subway system's line #2 is a circular route that's also the city's busiest; it happens to include Gangnam – as in "Gangnam Style" – among its dozens of popular stations. Author/illustrator Kim Hyo-eun's magnificent I Am the Subway highlights a train traveling...
*STARRED REVIEW The book is labeled fiction, but the extraordinarily haunting narrative is inspired by Keum Suk Gendry-Kim’s mother and two elderly survivors of Korean War separations who were briefly allowed to meet their North Korean families; Gendry-Kim’s mother still hopes to glimpse her sister. That survivor...
A book about a possible murder, award-winning French Canadian Pascal Girard's Rebecca & Lucie in the Case of the Missing Neighbor guarantees delight – if nothing else but to laugh with Girard himself. Here in his vivid graphic world, translated by Aleshia Jensen, Pascal Girard...
Samira Sedira's first English-language title, translated by Sara Vergnaud, is clearly marked "a novel" on its cover, and yet so much of the story is true. People Like Them is a fascinating amalgam of gruesome headlines – French newspapers in 2003 reported that an entire family...
Former UNESCO Goodwill Ambassador Zülfü Livaneli's startling Disquiet requires multi-layered engagement: to appreciate it as a penetrating novel about a Turkish family confronting murder and to acknowledge it as intense sociopolitical testimony of contemporary, too-little-known, ISIL-led (Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant) genocide of the...
